The mission of BlogAudio.org is to give you the resources you need to put audio files into your weblog and other web pages. It grew out of efforts to help Christopher Lydon put audio interviews into his blog and to build his BlogRadio.org website.

Our ideal is to capture, edit (at least mark start and end points), and deploy audio through a browser interface, but you may need cooperating server middleware (implementing SoX and transcode, for example). We will also survey desktop tools.

Browser playback is compromised by the browser opening a new window with advertising, and spawning a popup on window close with still more ads. We need a little utility that lets the user set a Media Player, then opens an audio file cleanly with no ad popup window. Alternatively, we can open audio in the same window by setting the Media Player size attributes to height="0" and width="0", but then no controls appear to pause and stop the audio.

Phone to Blog tools, including Audblog and Voice Monkey are hosted services that provide bloggers with the ability to post audio to their blogs from any phone. All you have to do is call their numbers and speak. They record an audio file and provide you with a link to it.

VoIP (Voice over IP) or Internet telephony will be a critical element of future BlogAudio efforts. In principle, we need only record the VoIP streams, edit them a little, then post audio files. VoIP should also bring the realization of "talk radio," with live listener call-ins, to the web.

Jon Udell has been quoting audio/video snippets (from Real Media files) for some months. It is a very difficult process at this time, but Jon's approach does not need a server to capture any media. He just hyperlinks to a media file and gives it start and end points.